The Haunted Valley by Ambrose Bierce -- Commentary The Gospel of Mary Magdalene -- San Francisco Opera Performance Review The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert -- Book Review Discussion
The
Haunted Valley
Short Story by
Ambrose Bierce, Commentary
"The Haunted
Valley" was Ambrose Bierce's first published story. It appeared in 1871 in the Overland Magazine. It deals with gender ambiguity, same sex
relationships, racial bigotry, and murder in the American West. The story is divided into two parts. In the first part, the narrator is traveling
through a remote area, presumably in California, although it doesn't say so
specifically, where he encounters Jo. Dunfer, a rancher whose most salient
personal qualities seem to be his bigotry against Chinese people and his
penchant for whiskey. Dunfer launches
into a narrative about taking on a Chinese man, Ah Wee, as a cook and servant
five years previous. Ah Wee and a man
named Gopher assist Dunfer in felling trees for a cabin he had wished to build
on a remote part of the ranch. Ah Wee is
incompetent at felling trees and Jo Dunfer admits to killing him for this and
other faults. The narrative is disrupted
at this point by a dramatic scream and Jo. Dunfer's collapse. Jo. Dunfer's assistant [Gopher, although he
is not named at this point] enters and the narrator briefly encounters him. This incident is not explained in any great
detail and the narrator leaves it in this ambiguous state. He departs Jo. Dunfer's residence in a
disturbed state of mind and on his journey chances to come upon the grave of Ah
Wee with this curious inscription.
AH WEE -- CHINAMAN
Age unknown. Worked for Jo. Dunfer.
This monument is erected by him to keep
the Chink's
memory green. Likewise as a warning to Celestials
not to take on airs. Devil take 'em!
She Was a Good Egg.
The choice of
pronouns is an operative point.
The second part of
the narrative takes place four years later when the protagonist returns to the
same area. This time he encounters
Gopher, the other (white) assistant to Jo. Dunfer. The narrator inquires about Jo. Dunfer and is
informed that he is dead and in the grave beside Ah Wee. Gopher accompanies the narrator to the grave
and tells him that indeed Jo. Dunfer had killed Ah Wee, but not out of
frustration with his abilities as a house servant, but out of jealousy over Ah
Wee's relationship with himself, Gopher.
One day Jo. Dunfer had caught Gopher and Ah Wee together and killed Ah
Wee with an ax in a jealous rampage.
Dunfer buried Ah Wee in the grave and created the curious memorial
marker.
Now comes the crucial
turn on the very last page of the story which I will quote.
"When
did Jo die?" I asked rather absently.
The answer took my breath:
"Pretty
soon after I looked at him through that knot-hole, w'en you had put something
in his w'isky, you derned Borgia!"
[referring to the narrator's previous visit, four years prior]
Recovering
somewhat from my surprise at this astounding charge, I was half-minded to
throttle the audacious accuser, but was restrained by a sudden conviction that
came to me in the light of a revelation.
I fixed a grave look upon him and asked, as calmly as I could: "And when did you go luny?"
"Nine
years ago!" he shrieked, throwing out his clenched hands -- "nine
years ago, w'en that big brute killed the woman who loved him better than she
did me! -- me who had followed 'er from San Francisco, where 'e won 'er at draw
poker! -- me who had watched over 'er for years w'en the scoundrel she belonged
to was ashamed to acknowledge 'er and treat 'er white -- me who for her sake
kept 'is cussed secret till it ate 'im up! -- me who w'en you poisoned the
beast fulfilled 'is last request to lay 'im alongside 'er and give 'im a stone
to the head of 'im! And I've never since
seen 'er grave till now, for I didn't want to meet 'im here." (Bierce, p.
126)
I found three
different commentaries on this story and I believe all three misunderstand
it. Bierce is admittedly not striving
for clarity, but the story is clear if one is attuned to the possibilities of
cross-gender identifications and same sex relationships.
Peter Boag (2012) in
his study of cross-dressing in the American West states that "Ah's sex is
never entirely clear; feminine and masculine pronouns interchange readily right
up to the story's conclusion. . . Thus Ah Wee may have been a Chinese woman
dressed as a man, or a (typically) feminized Chinese man" (p. 192)
William Wu (1982)
read the story as Ah Wee being a girl whom Dunfer had won in a poker game. Wu notes that the reader is misled through
the whole story to think that Ah Wee is a man, but fails account for this misleading
or to perceive the significance of the pronoun changes in the story. Wu is focused on the racism in the story and
thus misses the sexual implications that are really the crux of it, resulting
in a misunderstanding of the murder and the sex triangle. (Wu, 1982, p. 22)
Hellen Lee-Keller
(2006) also tries to normalize the story in the same way as Wu.
As the tombstone
indicated, Ah Wee was not, in fact, a he, but rather a she, and Dunfer killed Ah Wee in a fit of jealous rage thinking
that Ah Wee and Gopher were involved in a sexual relationship.
Ultimately, Dunfer, who had fallen in love with Ah Wee over the years, fell
into despair when he realized what he had done, started drinking heavily again,
and grew even more anti-Chinese.
Lee-Keller follows Wu
in seeing Ah Wee as female all the way through, but she doesn't address
Dunfer's referring to Ah Wee as 'he' throughout, and seems to call into
question that there was a sexual relationship between Gopher and Ah Wee. In other words, she suggests that Dunfer
killed Ah Wee out of misunderstanding and self-delusion.
The straightforward
assumption that Ah Wee's is a girl, won in a poker game, and subsequently
killed in a sex triangle, does not make sense of the text, the shifting
pronouns, and particularly the contrast between Dunfer's and Gopher's
constructions of Ah Wee. If you follow
the shifting pronouns, there is a logic to their modulations. They do not "interchange readily right
up to the story's conclusion," as Boag reports. Ah Wee is portrayed as a man by Jo. Dunfer through
the whole story up until the very end of his narrative, with the exception of
the curious epitaph on the tombstone.
Dunfer always referred to Ah Wee as 'he.' If Ah Wee were a girl, won in a poker game, why
would there be any need for Jo. Dunfer to disguise her as a man, or for Ah Wee
to adopt the identity of a man? If that
were the case, then it would mean that Jo. Dunfer imposed the male identity
upon her out of his own psychological need for a male sexual partner. But if that were true, why would he even take
a girl home to his ranch, if what he really wanted was a boy all along? The idea that Ah Wee was a girl straight up is
untenable. It fails to make sense of Jo.
Dunfer's referring to Ah Wee as 'he' throughout, and Gopher's pronoun shift
when he begins to talk about his own relationship with Ah Wee. If you think Ah Wee was "really a
she" as Lee-Keller thinks, then you have to explain why the whole story
leads you to assume Ah Wee is male. I
don't see any way to do that. The story
will simply not make sense if Ah Wee were really a female all the way through
from the outset.
Alternatively, if Ah
Wee were a female-to-male cross dresser, as one possibility suggested by Boag, it
would mean she was presenting as a male throughout the story. A full grown adult male would make an
unlikely prize in a poker game and this raises a question mark over the whole
tale about Ah Wee being a prize in a poker game. This
is Gopher's version probably concocted to mask the fact that Ah Wee left him
for Jo. Dunfer. The poker game story is
Gopher's attempt at face saving. Ah Wee
was very likely Gopher's lover before leaving him for Jo. Dunfer and moving to
his ranch in rural California. But was he/she
male or female?
If she were a
cross-dressed female-to-male, a la Alan Hart (see Boag, pp. 9-14), then you
would have a female who gender identified as male becoming involved in
"homosexual" relationships with two different males. A rather convoluted maneuver for a female to make. This is not a realistic scenario. I was not able to find any instance of a
female who gender identified as male, who then went on to form sexual
relationships with other men in her cross gender identity. Somebody out there come forward if you have a
counterexample. There is no plausible
interpretation of this story where Ah Wee is a natural female.
Gopher says that
"the scoundrel she belonged to refused to acknowledge her and treat her
white." This refusal to acknowledge
her I think refers to Jo. Dunfer's denoting Ah Wee as 'he,' that is, refusing
to acknowledge his/her full identification as a female. In other words, Jo. Dunfer insisted on Ah
Wee's biological gender as the proper identifier rather than accepting her psychological
identification as a female. This seemed
improper and disrespectful to Gopher, and he attributed it to Dunfer's shame
and denial of his own relationship with Ah Wee, and consistent with his further
maltreatment of her. Gopher referred to
Ah Wee as 'she,' when he was relating his own relationship to her, fully
acknowledging Ah Wee's psychological make-up.
This makes sense of the pronoun changes in the story and is consistent
with the details in the narration.
The most likely
scenario is that Ah Wee was a male-to-female cross-dresser, probably fully
gender identified as female in the mode of Mrs. Nash recounted in Boag's Re-dressing, Chapter 4.
Mrs. Nash was a
Mexican male-to-female cross-dresser who successfully passed herself off as a
woman among the U.S. Seventh Calvary in the 1870s and 80s for at least a ten
year period during which she was married to three different soldiers in the
Seventh. Although it was widely known
that she had a beard and shaved every day, she dressed and lived as a female,
winning high praise as well as financial rewards for her skills in laundering,
sewing, cooking, delivering babies, caring for infants, and witchcraft. When she died of appendicitis it was
discovered that "she had balls as big as a bull's. She's a man!" (Boag, pp. 130-137) The story became a national sensation.
I believe Ah Wee was
a comparable figure to Mrs. Nash, a biological male who dressed and
psychologically identified as a female.
Both Gopher and Dunfer knew Ah Wee's "real" gender. However, Jo. Dunfer did not recognize Ah
Wee's cross-gender identification, referring to him/her always as 'he,' whereas
Gopher, loving Ah Wee in her cross-dressed identity, referred to her as 'she,'
when he began talking about his own feelings for her.
The story told by
Gopher of Ah Wee's having been won in a poker game and his following her to
Dunfer's ranch suggests that the original attachment was between Ah Wee and
Gopher. Gopher was involved with Ah Wee
as a cross-dresssed male-to-female. Jo.
Dunfer came between them by some means or other. The poker winnings story seems unlikely to
me. If Gopher loved Ah Wee with the
dedication that he seems to evince, why would he wager her in a poker
game? More likely is that Ah Wee fled
with Dunfer to get away from Gopher. But
Gopher was a persistent, hopelessly attached lover who pursued Ah Wee to
Dunfer's ranch, got himself hired as a ranch hand by Dunfer, and continued his
relationship with Ah Wee whenever possible.
Dunfer caught Ah Wee
and Gopher together and killed Ah Wee in a jealous rampage. Gopher suggests that the encounter in which
they were caught was actually innocent in that he was reaching into Ah Wee's
clothing to remove a spider. But this again
sounds very self-serving on Gopher's part.
Dunfer had almost certainly known of Gopher and Ah Wee's prior
relationship and very likely had an inkling that they were continuing on the
sly behind his back. The violent jealous
rampage was probably the breaking of a dam of accumulated suspicion and
resentment. Dunfer confessed to killing
Ah Wee before the authorities, recounting the version he had given the narrator
and the case was judged a justifiable homicide.
He then erected the grave that Bierce describes with the curious
epitaph, where he acknowledges, finally, her true (psychological) identity as a
female.
In response to the
narrator's question about the time of Dunfer's death, Gopher levels the
accusation that he, the narrator, had
been the one to poison Dunfer. The
"revelation" that comes over the narrator at that moment is that
Gopher is making a confession. Indeed it
was Gopher who had killed Jo. Dunfer and buried him beside Ah Wee. How does he know this? Both he and Gopher know that he, the
narrator, did not poison Dunfer. So why
would Gopher make such an accusation?
The accusation that the narrator had been the one to poison Dunfer is
Gopher's thin -- or rather outrageous -- cover story, and it brings up the
suggestion that Jo. Dunfer did not die of natural causes. Why would Gopher make such an accusation if
he knew Jo. Dunfer had died a natural death?
In fact he knew perfectly well that Jo Dunfer did not die a natural death.
The narrator grasped all of this in an instant hearkening back to the
moment in Jo. Dunfer's house when he
saw
that the knot-hole in the wall had indeed become a human eye -- a full, black
eye, that glared into my own with an entire lack of expression more awful than
the most devilish glitter. I think I
must have covered my face with my hands to shut out the horrible illusion, if
such it was, and Jo.'s little white man-of-all-work [Gopher] coming into the
room broke the spell, and I walked out of the house with a sort of dazed fear
that delirium tremens might be
infectious. (Bierce, p. 120)
The narrator's visit to
Dunfer's ranch gave Gopher the opportunity he had probably been seeking for
some time. Gopher could claim that the
narrator had poisoned Dunfer and thus cover his tracks as the murderer. Gopher had plenty of motivation. Gopher had loved Ah Wee, but Ah Wee preferred
Dunfer to him -- at least that is the way it seemed to Gopher. Dunfer had taken Ah Wee away from Gopher -- allegedly
in a poker game, but most likely by other means. I think it probable that Ah
Wee left with Dunfer willingly to escape Gopher's clinging attachment. Dunfer treated Ah Wee badly, according to
Gopher -- this is plausible -- and eventually killed her in a jealous fit for
continuing her relationship with Gopher.
It was Gopher who buried Dunfer beside Ah Wee. It all fits.
Ah Wee is consistent with the type of male-to-female cross-dresser
described earlier in the case of Mrs. Nash and the Seventh U.S. Calvary. Jo. Dunfer's referring to Ah Wee as male but
then changing the pronoun on the tombstone:
"She was a Good Egg"
indicates that he had no illusions that Ah Wee had a dual gender
identity.
I think Bierce
understood what he was doing, and realized some people would be confused by the
story. He probably wanted it that
way. I suspect the story is based
somehow on real events and that it is not simply a product of Bierce's
fantasy. It was his first published
story, and I think it is significant that he would choose this topic as the
subject of his first public effort.
The story was written
around 1870, shortly after the Civil War.
The frontier was still very much an unsettled place of adventure and
opportunity. It was rapidly changing,
however, as were prevailing attitudes toward the many variants of sexual
expression. America was becoming more
anxious even as it grew stronger, men were becoming less confident in
themselves and in their place in the emerging industrial society, and people
were becoming conscious and questioning of the sexual behavior of
individuals. These strains and anxieties
are reflected in the intense racism in the story. However, the racial bigotry, which is quite
blatant, does not extend to the cross-dresser.
The cross-dresser is a curious anomaly, but is not yet pathologized per
se. Sexual and gender deviance are being
associated with race, and it would not be long before the reflexive racial
bigotry that was taken for granted and widely accepted would be extended to
sexual minorities of every sort. This
story represents a transition stage between a time when sexuality was less of a
public preoccupation to one where it became central to one's position and
acceptability in society.
The three published
commentaries on this story that I was able to locate gloss over or miss the
full import of the pronoun changes which are the heart of this sordid story of
sex and murder. The tendency is to
normalize the story, to heterosexualize it first of all, and to completely
ignore, or fail to perceive, the cross-gender identification that is central to
the whole drama. But Ah Wee's
male-to-female cross-gender identification is the only way to make full sense
of the text. If you pay attention to it,
the text is clear. It might have been
clearer to Bierce's audience in the late nineteenth century than it is to
us. Cross-dressing and cross-gender
identifications were much less obtrusive and much more amenable to integration
in society than they are today, as Boag's excellent examination of the subject
points out. The bigotry against the
male-to-female cross-dresser, was not as pervasive or even as widespread in the
nineteenth century as it is today.
Racial bigotry was certainly intense and taken for granted. This story illustrates how the country had
not yet solidified what would later become rigid stereotypes and expectations
for masculinity and male sexual behavior, but present day commentators tend to
project back onto the story our own present-day biases and preconceptions which
were still forming at the time the story was composed and were far from the fully
entrenched cultural norms they later became.
This historical blindness not only simplifies the story and robs it of
its psychological complexity, it also neutralizes the lessons it has to teach
us in how our own culture has evolved in its notions of masculinity and proper male
sexual behavior.
Notes
Bierce, Ambrose
(1984) The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by Ernest Hopkins. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska
Press.
Boag, Peter (2011) Re-Dressing America's Frontier Past.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London:
University of California Press.
Lee-Keller, Hellen
(2006) Ambrose Bierce Project Journal, Vol 2, No. 1.
Wu, William F.
(1982) The Yellow Peril: Chinese
Americans in American Fiction 1850-1940.
Hamden, CT: Archon Books.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene
San
Francisco Opera Performance
June
22, 2013
There are 13 mentions of Mary Magdalene by name in the
canonical gospels. I will list them here
without quoting them.
Mark 15:40
Mark 15:47
Mark 16:1
Mark 16:9
Luke 8:2
Luke 24:10
Matthew 27:56
Matthew 27:61
Matthew 28:1
John 19:25
John 20:1, 2
John 20:11
John 20: 16
The woman in Luke 7:36-50 who washes and kisses
his feet is sometimes assumed to be Mary Magdalene, but I don't count this
because she is not named in the passage.
There is no other mention of Mary Magdalene in
the New Testament and of these few references all but one of them is related to
the stories Jesus' death and resurrection.
Luke is the only gospel that mentions Mary Magdalene outside the context
of the final events of his life. About a
third of the gospel accounts are taken up with the dramatic last week of Jesus'
life. They are not particularly
interested in recounting the details of his life or who he was as a person. So it is curious that Mary Magdalene would
appear to play such an important role in this crucial part of his life, which
the gospels are supremely interested in, yet otherwise the gospel writers seem
at pains to minimize her importance and even discredit her. I can only conclude that Mary Magdalene must
have played such an important role during the week of Jesus' death and the
immediate aftermath, and this was so well known among the early Christian
groups that the gospel writers could not ignore or omit her, however much they
would have liked to. That immediately
leads to the question of what role she might have played in Jesus' life apart
from the week of his death. The gospels
have almost nothing to say about this.
Luke mentions that Jesus cast seven devils out of her and that she was
part of a group of women who supported Jesus and his (male) followers
"with their own means." (Luke
8:3) This must be the source of the
opera's portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a woman of some significant means. I found this a rather incredible stretch and
I do not think that Mary Magdalene was in any way or shape affluent.
In the gospel accounts Mary Magdalene was the
first one to discover the empty tomb and to "see" the resurrected
Jesus. The opera is ambivalent about the
resurrection, but seems to come down on the side of skepticism. As Mary is hunched over the body of Jesus he
rises up from below the stage behind her as a kind of apparition. They carry on a conversation wherein he
exhorts her to go out and tell others what he has imparted to her, but she
never faces him or interacts with him as in the gospel accounts. He then disappears beneath the stage leaving
Mary alone with the dead body of Jesus.
J. D. Crossan comments
The women's
discovery of the empty tomb was created by Mark to avoid a risen-apparition to
the disciples, and the women's vision of the risen Jesus was created by Matthew
to prepare for a risen apparition to the disciples. There is no evidence of historical tradition
about those two details prior to Mark in the 70s. Furthermore, the women, rather than being
there early and being steadily removed, are not there early but are steadily
included. They are included, of course,
to receive only message-visions, never mandate-visions. They are told to go tell the disciples, while
the disciples are told to go teach the nations.
(Crossan, p. 561)
The Gospel of Mary is a text from the second
century, composed at least a hundred years after the relevant events. It is fragmentary and there are only two
manuscripts in existence, one, a Greek text from the second century, and a
Coptic text from the fifth century ( Ehrman, p. 35) This text indicates that some early Christian
groups held Mary Magdalene in much higher regard than the writers of the
canonical gospels did. It also indicates
some rivalry between the followers of Peter and those who held Mary in higher
esteem. This rivalry probably had to do
with the basic direction and message of the movement. I am skeptical of the opera's depiction of
this as a personal rivalry between Peter and Mary for the attention of Jesus
and of clashes between Jesus and Peter over the basic direction and objectives
of the movement. I am equally skeptical
of Peter's opposition of Jesus marriage to Mary Magdalene, never mind the very idea
of the marriage itself.
This opera is a fanciful rewrite of the gospel
stories and message. It takes
considerable liberties with the traditional texts, and even with the Gnostic
texts that it loosely draws upon. I see
it as an attempt by a disgruntled Roman Catholic to recast the basic message of
Christianity into something a little more palatable for a modern audience. If you are a lapsed Catholic, or a nominal
Catholic, or a disgruntled, alienated Catholic, but unwilling to break entirely
with the Church and your past, you might see something sympathetic in
this.
I didn't care for it and found it frankly rather
dull. I debated with myself about
leaving at intermission, but I sat there so long thinking about it that I ended
up staying for the whole performance.
The reason that it is dull is that there is not much action. The characters share agonized ventilation of
their inner lives and their relationships in a soap-operatic style, but nothing
much happens. There is no drama. You have to be interested in these philosophical
speeches or the whole thing drops dead. The
set is visually uninteresting. It looks
like a construction site or a rock quarry and it doesn't change throughout the entire
performance. Usually operas are visually
interesting and imaginative if nothing else.
Even if you can't stand the music, the spectacle is worth the admission
price. But this one has little to offer
in the way of visual spectacle, so an important element of audience engagement
is removed. It would have helped if the
music was better, but I did not find anything memorable or interesting in the
music score, the singing, and especially in the lyrics. It was preachy, and the messages it was
trying to impart I did not find particularly insightful or thought
provoking. Some of it was rather trite,
in fact. If you are Catholic or a
traditional Christian, you might take umbrage at some of the departures from
the traditional conception of Jesus, his life, and his message. But this does not bother me at all. I thought the conception was a little
far-fetched in some respects, but the way I look at it, any reconstruction of
Jesus, any artistic representation of any aspect of his life, is by definition
an interpretation, and thus will be highly personal and idiosyncratic in
nature. This is fine with me. It is the nature of art and it is what is
interesting about art. I welcome
artists' reinventions of stories, incidents, personalities, and images from the
past in new and interesting characterizations.
My distaste for this performance has nothing to do with stodginess or
conservatism. I just didn't think it
came across.
An opera about Mary Magdalene raises issues for
the contemporary church that have a history going back to the beginning of the
Christian movement: the role of women,
not only within the church, but relations generally between men and women. Asceticism was major social and philosophical trend
both within early Christianity and in the many Gnostic sects that soon followed
and competed with budding Christianity.
Many of these writers despised women and especially warned men against sexual
connection to women. These people became
the orthodoxy within Christianity. But
Mary Magdalene remained a thorny challenge to their authority. If Mary had a special intimacy with Jesus
(whether sexual or not), it would set a bad precedent and a bad role model for
women and men within a church that exalted a de-sexualized existence,
especially for men. Women would have to
be included in the leadership, their views would have to be taken seriously,
sexual relations with women would be a legitimate concern and activity. This was anathema to these early ascetics, as
it is to ascetics today. Necessarily,
the role and significance of Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus would have to
be minimized and her authority on the teachings and mission of Jesus would have
to be discredited. And that is exactly
what happened. This opera brings these ancient
controversies back to life. It may
resonate with you, if you are struggling with any sort of ascetic proscriptions
weighing down your life, making you miserable, and destroying your personal relationships. But if you have somehow managed to avoid all
of that or freed yourself from it, then this opera will likely not have much to
offer you, and you'll find it rather tedious, as I did. There were plenty of empty seats. You can probably get tickets quite easily.
Notes
Crossan, J. D. (1998) The
Birth of Christianity. New
York: Harper Collins.
Ehrman, Bart D.
(2003) Lost Scriptures: Books that did
not make it into the New Testament.
Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
The
Dark Room, a novel
By
Rachel Seiffert. New York: Vintage
International/Random House. 2001. pp.
278.
I used to be a darkroom photographer, and have spent many
hours processing photographs with film and paper and chemicals struggling to
get a print just exactly right in a darkroom under safe lights. So I could relate very well to the opening
vignette in this triptych novel set in Germany from the 1920s until the end of
the twentieth century.
The book is actually three independent novellas, the first
of which, called Helmut, is the story of
a boy growing up in Berlin during the Nazi era.
It is the shortest of the three and my favorite. The character, Helmut, is the most appealing
person in the book and his observations of life in Berlin and his development
as a photographer had special resonance for me.
The last novella, Micha, is the crux of the book and the motivation and
impetus for writing it, I think.
However, I find this novella the least appealing, although it offers the
most in substantive issues that will dominate the discussion presented here.
In each novella photography makes an appearance, and
Seiffert seems to have intimate knowledge of photography and processing photos
in a darkroom. The title of the book, The Dark Room, ostensibly refers to
Helmut's use of the darkroom for processing his photographs. Apart from that there is nothing else that
relates to the title and by the end of the book, one is left wondering what the
title of the book has to do with the content, because the darkroom is not
central to the story line or to the larger issues raised by the book.
Reading Helmut, I could feel that the story was written by a
woman. Although the protagonist is a man,
a handicapped man in fact, he has the sensibility and temperament of a
woman. He cries way too much for a
man. This is true of all the men
throughout this book, with the exception of Kolesnik in the last segment, Micha.
They all seem like women in men's bodies. They are always crying over one thing or
another, confused, and ambivalent, unsure of themselves, indecisive. This is particularly so in the case of
Micha. He is the most feminine and most
conflicted of all the male characters in the book, and I think the one closest
to Seiffert's own voice and perspective.
Helmut's story is told in a tone of detachment, it has a surreal quality
that makes it very interesting. Helmut
is absorbed within himself, seems almost oblivious to the political ferment
going on around him. He seems to go
about his daily business unconscious of the momentous changes happening in
German society under the Nazis. For
example, there is a description of his rising one morning and finding broken
glass on the sidewalk. There is no
explanation or analysis of where the broken glass came from, but the
implication is that it was the result of Nazi gangs smashing the windows of
shopkeepers who were either Jewish or anti-Nazi. Helmut simply sweeps it up apparently without
reflection or reaction.
He has a preoccupation from childhood with watching the comings
and goings of trains at the Berlin Bahnhof.
During the war years his observations reveal that Berlin is slowly being
depopulated, and he carefully documents this development on a daily basis. But he does not question it. He does not ask himself why this is happening. He does not seem to reflect on his acute
observations. He is observationally
engaged, but emotionally detached. He seems
to have only minimal sexual interest for an adolescent boy. Helmut finds some pictures of nude women in a
stash of magazines kept hidden away by his employer, Gladigau. "At night he conjures the images against
his bedroom ceiling as the long, slow freight trains clatter below, a soothing
rhythm of sleep." (p.12) That's all
the sex he gets in the first twenty-four years of his life.
The middle of the three segments centers around a young girl names Lore. Her age is not given, but
one surmises her approximate age must be twelve to fourteen at most. She has a younger sister Liesel, who is
probably eight to ten, two twin brothers who must be six or seven, and an
infant brother, Peter, who is a babe in arms.
The story takes place at the end of the war and their mother, who
appears to have been a Nazi operative of some sort, is being taken into
detention by the invading Americans. She
instructs Lore to take the children on a trek from southern Germany to their
grandmother's residence in Hamburg far to the north, and gives her money and
jewelry for the trip.
The mother then
disappears and the story becomes the adventurous trek of this small troop of
children making their way the length of Germany to Hamburg, largely on foot,
during the chaos and uncertainty of the aftermath of the war. A rather unlikely and unhopeful scenario, I
think, but Sieffert's sensitive writing style and attention to detail make one
want to believe it. Along the way they
pick up an additional companion, an older boy named Tomas, who at first appears
to be Jew who has been released from a concentration camp by the
Americans. Later it seems that he may
have been a soldier or a prison guard who stole the identity of a dead Jew to
escape detection by the Americans (pp. 150-52).
Tomas befriends the young group and proves himself vital to their success
in completing the journey.
The story is a succession of perils and hardship which the
children negotiate with a combination of resourcefulness and luck. It gets a little repetitive after a while,
but there is enough richness and variety to keep it from dragging. Seiffert is a good story teller with a vivid
imagination for detail that keeps her narrative alive and moving.
There is almost no mention of sex or sexual interest in this
whole book, which is remarkable in a book featuring adolescents. The only glimpse we have of any sexual
experience in Lore is a negative one.
Lore is awakened by noises in
the dark. English male voices,
whispering. German female, coaxing. Shifting rubble, no more talking, only breathing.
Lore knows Tomas is awake, too. She is uncomfortable under the blankets,
shifts back against the cold grit of the bricks behind her. She doesn't want to hear what they are doing
under the ruined walls. She counts the
beams on the floor above her to block it out, but her mind keeps forming
pictures. Liesel turns over next to
her. Lore fights the urge to cover her
sister's ears.
There is whispering, and after
that, walking.
Lore wakes again later to more
noise: stifled breath and sobs. She
battles her straining ears, wills herself to sleep again. The sounds are closer, muffled by blankets,
not rubble walls. Lore allows herself to
listen to the dark around her.
Tomas
cries with his jacket over his face, arms wrapped over the top to keep the
sound inside. He pulls in gasps of air,
body a heaving shadow against the opposite wall. Lore doesn't want to see it or hear it. She would cry, only his tears have taken
over. She lies, awake and furious, until
daylight seeps through the cracks in the brickwork over her face. (p. 133-34)
What a prude she is! This
doesn't sound like the sensibility of a very young, presumably inexperienced,
girl. I would expect more curiosity and
receptiveness in a girl of that age. To
me this seems like the very unattractive attitude of an older woman, who has
been conditioned to shut out and devalue sexual experience and react to it in a
negative way. It is rather un-German, I
think. That's the juiciest part of this
book. A very negative, sanitized presentation
of young people coming of age.
On the cover of the book an anonymous critic from the
Philadelphia Inquirer is quoted who calls the book a novel about the German
soul in the twentieth century. I fear
many people will be misled by this. This
novel doesn't come anywhere close to being about the German soul. It purports to be an exploration of the
German soul, it tries to present itself in this way, but this is a novel about
an English woman trying to come to terms with her own conflicted feelings about
Germans and Germany.
The characters do not seem like Germans. They have German names and they are set in
Germany, but to me they don't feel like German people. The male characters do not feel like men, as
I mentioned earlier. In two of the three
stories the protagonists are male and in the Lore episode there is a male
character, Tomas, who plays a significant role.
The only male character who seems authentically male and authentically
German is Kolesnik, in the final segment, Micha,
and he is cast as Polish rather than German.
This is a woman writing about a subject and a domain that is
quintessentially male, namely, warfare.
There is nothing wrong with a woman offering her perspective on warfare
through the medium of a novel. It can be
a valuable and illuminating perspective.
But this novel is disingenuous in that it purports to represent male
soul searching and conflict over the nature of war and wartime atrocities, when
it is in fact a gently aggressive, judgmental, moralistic attack on the
brutality and excess of warfare from a very female perspective of naive shock
and outrage. Seiffert's position amounts
to "How could you do such a thing, Grandpa?" She finds it hard to grasp how men who can
shoot young children in cold blood can still love their families and be good
citizens.
Micha, more
than any other character and more than the other two novellas, represents what
Seiffert really wants to get at in this book.
Micha is a German man, probably in his 20s, who, as a hobby, takes up
tracing his own family history. The
story is set in 1997, so he is looking back over a century of upheaval,
warfare, and social disarray that his forebears had lived through. This leads to an investigation of his
deceased grandfather who was in the Waffen SS stationed in Belarus.
The Waffen SS in Belarus and Poland committed some of the
most bestial atrocities of the war.
After the war the German government labeled it a criminal
organization. Their behavior was extreme
even by SS standards. In Poland they
were so wantonly rampaging that Heinrich Himmler had to send a battalion of SS
police to make sure they did not attack their own commanders and other German
units in the vicinity.
Micha became obsessed to find out for sure if his grandfather
had participated in any of that, or if he was the teddy bear that he always
knew him to be. After the war, the
Russians had kept his grandfather in prison for nine years. He did not rejoin his family in Germany until
1954. That ought to serve as a clue.
Micha digs up where his grandfather had been
stationed in Belarus and some of the atrocities that had gone on there. He makes several journeys to Belarus to
investigate and after a lengthy negotiation, interviews a Polish man named
Kolesnik, who was there and saw what happened and was himself a
participant. Kolesnik essentially stands
in for the deceased grandfather, and is the screen against which Seiffert
projects the issues that are preoccupying her in the writing of this book.
After page 220, I became disgusted with it, and by page 250,
I was raining down the full brunt of my wrath upon it. It was when Micha was photographing Kolesnik
and his wife (p. 254-55) that Seiffert tipped her hand and I saw her for what
she is. Elena (Kolesnik's wife) wants to
take a photograph of Kolesnik and Micha together, but Micha refuses to be
photographed with Kolesnik. Why did he
refuse to be photographed with this man with whom he had established a
relationship of trust and who had been sharing intimate confidences of an
utmost personal nature over several months?
Why would he not want to participate in a permanent commemoration of the
relationship? The photograph would
represent a personal bond and an acknowledgment of this personal quest that
Micha had embarked upon. The refusal
indicates a rejection of Kolesnik by Micha as well as a hypocrisy in that he
wishes to deny, both to himself and others, the personal connection he had
forged with Kolesnik in order to induce him to talk. This refusal shows that he is not reaching
out to Kolesnik from the heart to create a personal bond of trust and mutual
understanding, rather he is seducing Kolesnik in order to use him to satisfy
his own personal need: when he is finished with him he will discard him. It is dishonest and disgusting. I think it is a crucial moment in the novel
in that it is not just a further development of the character of Micha, but
rather a revelation of Seiffert's attitude and purpose in writing the
story.
Seiffert is still fighting the war and still fighting within
herself how to regard Germany and German people, particularly of the World War
II generation. She herself is not a
wounded victim. Her family did not suffer
under the Nazis. This grudge comes from
an attitude of moral outrage over the atrocities committed in the war. She is making it personal by setting it in
the context of a family, a German family -- at least a German family as she
imagines them. But I think it is a false
picture, or at best very atypical.
What is offensive about this book is not so much its point
of view, although I take strong exception to it, but that it purports to be
something that it isn't. As such it will
misguide and misinform English speaking readers about German people and German
culture. If even critics like the
reviewers for New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer are befooled, then
what of the general reader?
This book is a fraud, but I will tell you the truth. I was in Berlin last fall and observed a
vibrant, thriving, multicultural city growing rapidly and moving forward into
the future with high energy and enthusiasm.
But it is also a city very conscious of its past, much more than any
American city I have ever seen. The
contrast between past and present in Berlin is evident in nearly every
block. The weight of the past is visible
in the architecture, old and new, the streets, the public art visible all over
the city, and in the minds and conversations of the residents. But it is nothing like the anguish and
ambivalence that you see in Seiffert.
Today there is a community of approximately 12,000 Jews
living in Berlin. There are active
synagogues, a large, very interesting Jewish Museum, opened in 2001, and a
sizeable Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe, opened May 2005, just one block south of the Brandenburg Gate. I was told by a tour guide that it was built
on the site of Josef Goebbels residence during the Nazi era, but I was not able
to verify this. This memorial is very
controversial in many respects, but the fact that such a substantial memorial,
extending over nearly five acres, exists in such a prominent place in the city
is evidence of official repudiation of the Nazi policies and attitudes toward
Jews and everyone. That is a firm
conviction literally set in stone. The
architect who designed it was an American Jew named Peter Eisenman. In the following excerpt from an interview
with Der Spiegel (May 9, 2005) he
comments on the memorial and its psychological meaning and purpose.
Spiegel Online: Who is the monument for? Is it for the Jews?
Eisenman: It's for the German people. I don't think it was ever intended to be for
the Jews. It's a wonderful expression of
the German people to place something in the middle of their city that reminds
them -- could remind them -- of the past.
Spiegel Online: An expression of guilt, you mean? Some have criticized the monument by saying
it looks like a gigantic cemetery.
Eisenman: No.
For me it wasn't about guilt.
When looking at Germans, I have never felt a sense that they are
guilty. I have encountered anti-Semitism
in the United States as well. Clearly
the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it is clearly a
terribly moment in history. But how long
does one feel guilty? Can we get over
that?
I have always thought that this
monument was about trying to get over this question of guilt. Whenever I come here, I arrive feeling like
an American. But by the time I leave, I
feel like a Jew. And why is that? Because Germans go out of their way -- because
I am a Jew -- to make me feel good. And
that makes me feel worse. I can't deal
with it. Stop making me feel good. If you are anti-Semitic, fine. If you don't like me personally, fine. But deal with me as an individual, not as a
Jew. I would hope that this memorial, in
its absence of guilt-making, is part of the process of getting over that
guilt. You cannot live with guilt. If Germany did, then the whole country would
have to go to an analyst. I don't know
how else to say it.
The memorial and the behavior of the Germans toward the
architect illustrate a decisive repudiation of Nazi-ism within the mainstream
German culture. There is no
squeamishness about facing up to the past as represented in The Dark Room. This memorial in the center of Berlin is vast.
It doesn't show any indecisiveness or unwillingness to face up to the
issue. At the same time a controversy
blew up during the construction of the memorial because of a coating on the
stone slabs meant to inhibit the scrawling of graffiti on them.
It happened that the company that manufactured this coating to preserve
the Jewish Memorial from defacement was also the same company that manufactured
the gas that was used to poison Jews in the concentration camps.
The product was to have been provided by Degussa, a big German chemical
company.
Now it turns out that Degussa once owned Degesch,
the firm that produced the Zyklon B used to gas Jews in concentration camps. At first,
nobody noticed—or nobody wanted to notice. But then the press discovered the
link, reportedly after being tipped off by a Swiss company that had hoped to
win the contract until Degussa decided to donate half the material needed.
After the story broke, the memorial's board of trustees, after an
apparently heated discussion, concluded that using the firm's product, called
Protectosil, would be “unacceptable given the specific nature of the Memorial
project”. It advised the construction company to stop using the coating until
another product could be found.
Degussa has not, in fact, been one of the companies that shies away from
its past. It is an active member in the foundation created by German companies
to compensate victims of forced labour. And it has commissioned researchers to
look into its history, without having any say over what they publish.
This behavior is by no means exceptional these days. Since the
mid-1990s, says Manfred Pohl, a historian and head of corporate cultural
affairs at Deutsche Bank, most large German companies have reappraised their
history. It is now time, he argues, to forgive them (not the same as
forgetting). By excluding Degussa from the Holocaust memorial, an opportunity
has been missed to do just that. One could also claim that it is unfair to
penalise today's shareholders or employees of Degussa for the actions of the
company in the past. (The Economist, October 30, 2003)
It is exactly the same issue in play in Seiffert's
novel. But the Germans do not show the
anxiety and confusion and paralysis before the issue that Micha shows. He does not represent typical German
attitudes or behavior. Germans are quite
good about facing up to the issue. They might come to differing conclusions,
but they are almost always decisive and surefooted in whatever their
direction. Germans want to get on with
it. That doesn't mean they want to
forget. They are not deniers. But the kind of anxious preoccupation shown in
Sieffert's lead character is very un-German in my eyes.
When I was in graduate school, I took several seminars that
fell under the umbrella description of "Ethics." We studied books by authors such as John
Rawls and Robert Nozick. I was shocked
at how naive and simple-minded they were, and the crudeness of the methods
whereon these intellectual edifices were constructed. My professors took it all very seriously, but
I had undisguised contempt for what I was being taught. The professors and the authors of these books
believe that there are timeless principles of ethical conduct that are
independent of time and circumstance and culture, and that they can be
discerned and refined by a process of concocting (usually) hypothetical
situations and then testing various alternatives and outcomes against our
"intuitions." In the case of
Robert Nozick it was individual rights, in the case of John Rawls, it was
principles of distributive justice. My
professors had great faith in this faculty of moral intuition which they
thought was inherent in people and could lead in principle to universal
agreement. Absolute standards of Right
and Wrong could be discerned and applied to people and events independent of
cultural or historical frames of reference.
For example, Aristotle, and virtually everyone in the
ancient world, took slavery for granted and never questioned its legitimacy as
an institutionalized social practice. My
professors thought that today, from our vantage point of modern enlightenment,
we can judge with finality that Aristotle was wrong and that those ancient societies
were unjust with the same surety that we can judge that their calculation of
the circumference of the earth was wrong as well as their conception of the
causes of disease. In other words,
"ethics" can make "progress," and our understanding of
proper moral conduct can be "improved." In fact, human beings can themselves be made
better in terms of their moral character should they apply these advances in
ethical insight to their daily lives. By
implication, some people can be judged to be morally superior to others with
absolute certitude and conviction. One
professor once asserted with fervent conviction the he was a better human being
than Adolf Hitler. I nearly laughed in
his face. This whole project of constructing
these "ethical" systems by which human beings could be evaluated and
compared seemed to me to be breathtakingly arrogant, naive, and stupid. Unworthy of serious scholarly consideration. I couldn't believe they were teaching this in
a university and that they expected me to read this stuff and take it
seriously. They judged me to be devoid
of capacity for ethical thinking and unsuitable to even be in graduate
school. We didn't like each other.
This approach and mindset behind all of these modern
formulations of universal human rights and war crimes goes back to Immanuel
Kant in the late 18th century, who believed that moral principles must be
understood a priori, that is independent of the contingencies of time,
circumstance, and experience. A categorical
imperative is one whose validity and applicability is universal, that is, in
all circumstances and it is justified as an end in itself -- as opposed to
being a means toward some greater good.
How one recognizes such imperatives and applies them to practical
situations is not easy to grasp, but Kant had great faith in reason and he also
believed that we had an innate sense of what was right that was not dependent
on experience, that conscience tempered by reason could yield access to this
inner light of moral right. This was
roughly the approach that my professors believed in and tried unsuccessfully to
inculcate in me.
I think Rachel Seiffert believes something similar to what
my ethics professors believed, although she doesn't think in these grand
philosophical superstructures, but I feel that same revulsion toward her and
what she is doing that I felt toward them.
She thinks she can judge her Waffen SS grandfather with the same
righteous certitude that my professor felt when he asserted his moral
superiority to Adolf Hitler. What is
offensive about it is that Seiffert and the professor think they are delivering
"objective" judgments that have universal validity rather than
subjective reactions. They want to claim
a correctness that goes beyond themselves and their own subjectivity, the
limitations and contingencies of their own personal point of view and position
in the world. This
"correctness" can be imposed as "truth" on anyone. It is not simply a point of view. It is what everyone should think. This
is what is objectionable.
I probably would not like her son of a bitch Nazi
grandfather either, and I'm sure I wouldn't care much for Adolf Hitler. But that is because of who I am, how I have
been brought up, my values and goals and assumptions about life that have been
shaped by long experience and the time in which I live. I do not claim that they has any validity
beyond myself. I'm willing to concede
that others with different experience in different times and circumstances may
see things differently. Seiffert and the
philosophy professors are not.
I am squarely in the Nietzschean camp, who reject Kant and
any attempt to formulate moral principles that are absolute and universal. Moral sentiments have to be understood as
arising not from abstract principles, reason, or some window of universal
conscience, but in deep, visceral, emotional reactions. When we see the piles of emaciated bodies in
the concentration camps, our reaction of shock and horror is not a reasoned
inference based on some universal principle.
It is a gut reaction of the most visceral emotion. Our sense of morality, our understanding of
Right and Wrong, begins in these primitive emotional responses. Principles are abstractions that attempt to
generalize from these primitive feelings to guide our future conduct and judge
the conduct of others in situations that might have less immediate clarity. But the fundamental basis for morality is our
human emotional dispositions. As such,
moral preconceptions are highly variable and dependent on time, circumstance,
culture, experience, and personal psychology.
They are inherently precluded from ever becoming anything like a
universal imperative or a consensus across humanity. Attempts to formulate a universal moral code
or universal moral principles is an exercise in futility. At best it is self-deception. At worst it is hypocrisy and a legitimization
of authoritarianism.
Rachel Seiffert, without being self-conscious about it, does
have this predominant religio-Kantian context operating in the background and
takes its presumptions for granted. Her
book can be seen as an illustration of how this absolutist attitude toward
moral principles plays out in the interpersonal relations of a family and the
estrangements and antagonisms that result.
The advantage of my point of view over Seiffert's or the
ethics professors' is that it allows greater openness, greater flexibility, and
greater tolerance. The ethics professors
who believe in absolute Rights and Wrongs are afraid to let anyone think
differently from themselves. They want
to feel like their rightness is not limited to themselves and therefore they
are justified in imposing their judgments of right and wrong on others and in
requiring others to follow their mandates and conform to their standards. It is the instinct of the religious
priesthood in a different guise. Instead
of being the spokesmen for God, they claim to be speaking for "all
humanity." We don't need it, and
its arrogance and blindness is a potentially dangerous, pathological force in
society.
I can like people that I don't like and the contradiction
does not bother me. Seiffert, believing
as she does in absolute rights and wrongs, always has to be aligned with the
side of right and never with the side of wrong.
She is convinced that there is a right and a wrong from which to orient
oneself. She can never allow herself to
like someone who is evil. Micha thinks
he will never get used to it that Kolesnik likes him (p. 259). I do not have these limitations.
As far as war crimes are concerned, you need to keep in mind
that it is always the winners who try the losers. The winners define what the crimes are, who
the criminals are. They appoint the
judges, conduct the trials, pass sentences, and mete out punishments. Victorious armies rarely try their own
soldiers, commanders, or political leaders for war crimes. The United States can point to a few well
publicized exceptions, but these are always low level soldiers who are
portrayed to be rogue. The opportunity
to discredit a few low level common soldiers for excess actually masks the
larger, more systematic destructiveness being wreaked upon a country and its
population that is sanctioned and promoted at much higher levels.
For example, today about 20% of the territory of Vietnam is
uninhabitable because of unexploded American munitions. On much of the landscape nothing will grow
because of the use of the defoliant Agent Orange during the war (Atlantic, June 2012). Is this a war crime? Is anybody being prosecuted for it? Not even the Vietnamese are pursuing it as
such. They don't see it in their
political interest to continue the conflict with the Americans despite the
lingering effects of the war upon their country.
Charles Anthony Smith (2012) traces the beginnings of the
concept of war crime to the trial of King Charles I of England by Oliver
Cromwell.
This prosecution came about
after the conclusion of a conflict for the nominal purpose of punishing the
defeated leader for crimes such as the murder of civilians, torture of
captives, and forced conscription. The
trial of Charles I was antecedent to modern war crimes trials. (p. 21)
Once the Nazis were defeated
and World War II came to a close, however, the Allies institutionalized the
concept of war crimes tribunals through the Nuremberg Trials. (p. 22)
The Nuremberg Trials have been judged a success and a role
model for future proceedings of this type.
A similar series of trials in Tokyo at the end of World War II have not
been so favorably judged. The Nuremberg
Trials
embraced concerns about
substantive due process and procedural process as inherent to a just
proceeding, the trials in Tokyo reverted to a show trial model with an almost
complete disregard for the concepts of justice. (p. 80)
Smith goes on to present detailed analyses of subsequent war
crimes trials in many modern contexts including Argentina, South Africa, the
former Soviet States, the former Yugoslav States, Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan,
and the "War on Terror."
The fundamental question
considered here through the historical evolution and development of war crimes
tribunals in their various forms is whether human rights tribunals, ad hoc or
standing, promote and are the product of concerns about justice or are they
more likely to be a manifestation of normal political processes and efforts to
consolidate political power. (p. 270)
The cases examined here
demonstrate that the purpose of the tribunals has been the consolidation of
political power. (p. 271)
I concur with his analysis and evaluation of these processes
and their underlying philosophical preconceptions.
Smith contrasts the character of the war crimes tribunals that
are the consequence of peace through victory and the peace accord reached in
Ireland in 1998, known as the Belfast Agreement, or the Good Friday Agreement.
One of the notable aspects of
the case of Northern Ireland is the complete omission of any provision for war
crimes trials or tribunals of any sort.
The long and violent history of the conflict in Northern Ireland
includes multiple tragedies and the killing of non-combatants, indiscriminate
bombings in civilian areas, the unlawful imprisonment of opponents, and a
variety of other actions that, in other contexts, have led to prosecutions for
gross violations of human rights. (p. 278)
Smith points out that this was not simply an omission on the
part of the parties to the agreement, but a considered judgment.
The tragedies of the past have
left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering. We must never forget those who have died or
been injured, and their families. But we
can best honor them through a fresh start in which we firmly dedicate ourselves
to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust and to the
protection and vindication of the human rights of all. (Belfast
Accord 3, quoted in Smith, p. 279)
One important factor influencing the character of this peace
settlement was that no side in the conflict was able or likely to accomplish a
sustainable military or political victory.
In other words, a draw on the battlefield means no war crimes trials
will take place. So much for absolute,
indelible principles of Right and Wrong.
Micha is carrying out a war crimes tribunal on a personal
level within his own family. The story
reveals how disingenuous, hypocritical, and destructive it is. In the final pages the pent up rage and
vengeance begins to pour forth. Micha
seems to care about nothing else but the crimes of his grandfather. The desire for punishment even extends to the grandfather's
wife. He knows she covered it up, so she
is also guilty. He fights with his
sister, is estranged from his wife, refuses to visit his grandmother, does not
speak with his parents. Every
relationship he has is poisoned by his obsession with the facts of his
grandfather's Nazi past. (p.261) This
orgy of self-castigation is very un-German.
It appears to me to be Germans the way Seiffert would like to see them,
what she hopes they might be.
At the very end of the book there is a perfunctory,
supremely unconvincing gesture toward reconciliation as Micha brings his young
daughter to visit her grandmother for the first time, apparently some years
after the main subject matter of the story.
It doesn't work as a repudiation of the thrust of the whole narrative,
nor does it work as a logical outcome of character and events. This flippant gesture feels like an
afterthought, and a rather thoughtless one at that. I think it reflects Seiffert's utter confusion
in the face of the issues she's struggling with.
As Nietzsche pointed out, if God is dead, then there can be
no absolute, timeless basis for moral imperatives. Moral preconceptions and judgments become
context dependent subject to variables of culture, social context, and personal
psychology. It does not mean, as
Dostoevsky mistakenly thought, that all things become permissible. Who grants permission? It means that all moral judgments and all
human conduct must be understood within the social, cultural, and psychological
context in which they occur. This is not
a distressing situation as Jean Paul Sartre lamented in Existentialism is a Humanism (1946, p. 294). It means we are in charge, and we are making
the decisions. And those decisions will
be made according to the perceptions and values and norms of the times in which
we live. There is nothing wrong with
this. There never were any gods and
there were never any priests speaking with God's voice. Everything is as it has always been. A clearer understanding of the human
condition removes the arrogance and grandiosity from our claims of moral
certitude, and with that demise comes an opportunity for greater understanding
of even the most evil people and the most despicable actions. It doesn't mean that we won't kill them for
it. But we will do it on our own authority,
not the authority of God or universal Right.
I can condemn the piles of bodies at Belsen and Buchenwald
the same as Seiffert can. I can feel the
same horror and revulsion at the atrocities and brutality of the war. But I know that my rejection and condemnation
of these actions does not go beyond myself and there may be others who feel
very differently. I do not speak with
the voice of God or for all humanity. At
the same time I have the capacity to relate with warmth and congeniality to the
perpetrators of the most unspeakable crimes.
No matter how bad people are, not everything about them is bad. There is always more to them than their worst
manifestations. Windows and bridges are
always possible. I believe it is a
positive advantage in human relating that surpasses that offered by the perspective
displayed in Seiffert's book and by my ethics professors.
The
Dark Room is a book about Rachel Seiffert. It is not about Germans or Germany. Keep that in mind if you decide to read
it.
Notes
The BBC has a nice concise summary of the history of the
concept of war crimes and their application.
Der
Spiegel Online May 9, 2005
Kaplan, Robert D. (2012) The Vietnam Solution. The
Atlantic. June 2012.
Sartre, Jean Paul (1946)
Existentialism is a Humanism. In Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing/Meridian. pp. 287-311.
Smith, Charles Anthony (2012) The
Rise and Fall of War Crimes Trials: From
Charles I to Bush II. Cambridge, New
York: Cambridge University Press. 316 pp.